Discards Sampling of the Dutch and German Brown shrimp fisheries in 2009 - 2012

In the European Union the collection of discard data is enforced trough the Data Collection Regulation or Framework (DCF) of the European Commission (EC). To comply with this ruling, shrimp trawlers have been monitored since 2008 for the Netherlands and since 2006 for Germany. This report presents the information of both sampling programmes from 2009 to 2012. The initiative to describe the methods and results of the monitoring of brown shrimp fisheries in a joint report anticipates on the harmonised regional sampling of commercial fisheries as described in the DCF.